


deserves a quiet night

by baliset



Category: Blaseball (Video Game)
Genre: Ghost Pining, M/M, The Trench, Vague mentions of drowning, incineration/instability scars, language loss/loss of speech, maincord prohibited swearing, two dead guys going swimming on solstice is something that can be so personal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-20
Updated: 2021-01-20
Packaged: 2021-03-12 04:07:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,692
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28879203
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/baliset/pseuds/baliset
Summary: “What!” Sebastian says, when the chair is all the way around and he can see Derrick. He doesn’t look mad, just startled, his three eyes wide and glowing faintly in the dark. “You scared me!”“Sorry,” Derrick says. “Do you want to do something stupid?”“Of course,” Sebastian says, without hesitation.(or: two dead men go for a swim.)
Relationships: Sebastian Telephone/Derrick Krueger
Comments: 9
Kudos: 27





	deserves a quiet night

**Author's Note:**

> hello! this fic borrows heavily from null team twitter canon, including the idea that the longer you are in the trench the more garbled your communication becomes. derrick usually speaks in song lyrics and sebastian usually speaks in morse, but on the winter solstice everyone could talk in their old voices again for 24 hours.
> 
> seb's characterization owes a lot to [automatronic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/automatronic/pseuds/automatronic)'s portrayal of him in rp!

There are two and a half hours left until midnight. Derrick isn’t as good at measuring out hours and minutes without a clock as some people in the Trench are, but he’s painfully aware of how little time he has left with his own voice sitting heavy in his throat. He doesn’t quite understand how the solstice thing works - all he knows is that the veil is thin, everyone in the Trench can talk the way they used to, and at midnight the spell wears off and the carriage turns back into a pumpkin, or whatever.

It’s a little fucked up, Derrick thinks, that he’s gotten used to the way things usually are. His mind feels too quiet without the hum of static or the choppy voices of the constantly-tracking radio. His throat hurts from using his vocal cords, instead of just opening his mouth to let a sound that isn’t his come out. He’s forgotten how to make small talk, and he can’t hide the bluntness behind abstractions and metaphors.

All of that said, only having a day to spend with his own voice is too little time. So he’s going to do something stupid about it.

It’s the kind of stupid thing he’d usually do alone - that he _should_ be doing alone, to keep anyone else from catching the blowback. It’s also the kind of stupid thing that he could ask any of the other Garages in the Trench to do with him, and get an immediate yes. But Derrick doesn’t ask the other Garages, and he finds himself standing in the doorway of the switchboard room instead of going alone.

“Hey,” he says, leaning himself up against the frame. “Telephone Line.”

An electronic beep of surprise sounds from the swivel chair on the other side of the room. Derrick knows before it spins around that Sebastian is perched on the chair, knees pulled up and hugged to his chest. He’s been in here just about all day. He comes here when it’s not the solstice, too, on the scarce breaks the Null Team gets from playing on the field. Apparently he’s the best at making the switchboard actually work, but Derrick suspects it’s more than that; that Sebastian is waiting for a call that hasn’t come yet. Or one that won’t come at all.

“What!” Sebastian says, when the chair is all the way around and he can see Derrick. He doesn’t look mad, just startled, his three eyes wide and glowing faintly in the dark. “You scared me!”

“Sorry,” Derrick says. “Do you want to do something stupid?”

“Of course,” Sebastian says, without hesitation.

Derrick had thought there would be more to it than this. That he was going to have to answer a hundred questions about what he intended to do, and why, or that Sebastian was going to turn him down. They’re not even friends, and Derrick’s been borderline rude to Sebastian most of the time he’s been here, but apparently Sebastian’s not worried about any of that. Good to know.

“Can you swim?” he asks Sebastian, which he probably should have led with in the first place.

“Yeah,” Sebastian says. “I mean, kind of.”

“Kind of,” Derrick repeats, cocking his head to one side, inviting explanation.

“I won’t drown, if that’s what you’re asking.” 

Sebastian gets up out of his chair. He’s not wearing shoes, and his feet make no sound against the cold marble floor as he pads over to Derrick in the doorway. He stands a head shorter than Derrick, and has to tip his chin up when he looks Derrick in the eye, the low light casting his acne-scarred face into shadow.

“Are we going?” he asks, and Derrick realizes that Sebastian is waiting for him to stop taking up the entire doorway like an asshole.

“Yeah. Sorry,” Derrick says, for the second time in as many minutes, twisting his body out of the door frame so that Sebastian can get by him. He realizes - again, too late - that he’s meant to be leading the way, and starts heading down the hall at a pace that should keep him a good five feet in front of Sebastian at all times. To discourage small talk, he tells himself. He can’t do small talk. He’ll just hurt somebody’s feelings.

Unfortunately, Sebastian is fast. Faster than anticipated. He keeps pace with Derrick effortlessly, and Derrick can feel the glow of Sebastian’s eyes fixed on him. He supposes he could walk with longer strides, quicken his pace, but he’s too tired to be petty and he isn’t about to completely leave Sebastian behind.

“You don’t want to talk to me,” Sebastian observes, more blunt than Derrick’s ever heard him.

Derrick feels a flush creep up the back of his neck. He shoves his hands into his pockets to give them something to do. “It’s not about you, Telephone Line.”

“So what?”

“I’m not good at small talk anymore,” he says. “Feels kind of pointless.”

It occurs to him that Sebastian might actually understand what he means. Sebastian has been losing his voice, too, since he first came down here - accelerated since his second incineration. It went similarly to Derrick’s, first breaking up like a caller with a bad connection, then slowly fading to electronic beeps and fast-talking dots and dashes of Morse. Derrick knows they both communicate with notepads or sign language when they’re frustrated, trying to get across something important or complicated, but most of the time they both make people meet them where they’re at. Maybe Sebastian likes to be obtuse sometimes, too.

“Well, we don’t have to talk about the weather,” Sebastian says, rolling his third eye. “But if you want me to come do something stupid with you, we have to talk about _something_.”

“No, we don’t,” Derrick says.

“Why do you call me Telephone Line?” Sebastian asks. “We can talk about that.”

Derrick stops, just for a second, to study Sebastian’s face and gauge if he’s kidding. Sebastian just blinks back at him, evidently serious - or just good at looking like he is.

“It’s a song,” Derrick says, finally, when he starts walking again.

“A song that reminds you of me,” Sebastian supplies. It’s more a statement than a question, like he knows what the answer is already.

“I thought - it’s an easy way to get your attention when I’m not…” Derrick gestures vaguely at his face and throat. His face still feels hot, even more than it was before. Referring to people in the Trench by the songs that flit through his mind when he looks at them is a lot easier when he doesn’t have to explain it.

“Does it bother you?” he asks.

“I was just curious,” Sebastian says, shrugging. “I don’t really listen to music.”

 _You listen to_ me, Derrick thinks, but doesn’t say. _Sometimes I feel more like music than a person._

“Where are we going?” Sebastian asks, and saves him from having to say anything at all.

“The Hall,” Derrick says, relieved to be back in familiar conversational territory. Easy question, easy answer.

“We’re going swimming in the Hall.”

“Outside the Hall, yeah.” Derrick wonders if telling Sebastian the plan up front would have saved some time and breath. “In the Trench. The actual Trench.”

“Oh,” Sebastian says, and is quiet the rest of the way there.

***

The Hall of Flame is a long, cold room made of black marble, filled with decaying statues of the players consigned to the Trench, and the bins of equally decaying piles of peanuts tributed to them by fans. Derrick doesn’t know who makes the statues. They just appear whenever a new arrival does, and he swears the Hall gets longer to accommodate, because he doesn’t remember it being quite so big back in Season 3.

Each statue shows its player in the moment of their death. Some have faces frozen in rictuses of fear or pain, some are cheerfully oblivious. Some are in motion, diving to catch a ball, or batting, or running to save someone else from the umpire. Derrick’s is one of the oblivious ones - caught in the middle of winding up for a pitch, his back foot dragging against the ground, brow drawn tight with concentration. It’s impressive work, down to the frayed bill of his cap and the beads of sweat on his face.

Sebastian’s statue changed after his second incineration. Derrick doesn’t completely remember what it used to be, but he thinks it was Sebastian sitting down, maybe in the dugout. Now, though, it shows Sebastian in the Hall Stars uniform, his hair whipping around his face in an invisible wind. One of his hands is on his bat, slack at his side, and his other hand is reaching for someone, fingers curled inwards just so, each joint sculpted and creased with care. You can only see it if you’re looking closely, but in this one, Sebastian is crying.

“Hey,” Sebastian says, as they breeze past his statue and Derrick’s, “you’ve got almost as many peanuts as me.”

“Yeah,” Derrick says. He’s pretty sure their rankings in the Hall don’t actually mean anything, now that the Hall Stars had their chance to fight and be released. He tries not to get his hopes up, anyway. But it’s a little nice to be that high on the board. To feel acknowledged, even slightly.

There are two things that make the Hall of Flame different from other common areas of the Trench. The first is that it’s easy to find. If you’re wandering the labyrinthine halls of the Trench, lost or looking for nothing in particular, you will always either end up at the Hall or at the field where the Null Team plays ball. Derrick usually finds himself here on the infrequent nights when he sleepwalks, and it’s not uncommon to see other members of the Null Team passing through.

The second thing that makes the Hall different is that it has windows, through which the ocean is visible. The water is dark - Nora has said before that they’re too far under the sea for sunlight to reach them from the surface. But Derrick thinks he sees things moving out there, sometimes, and he’s asked other people in the Trench who agree with him.

“Do you have a plan to get out there?” Sebastian asks, eyeing the windows.

“Sort of,” Derrick says. He stops in front of Nora’s statue, about halfway down the Hall, and starts to strip out of his shoes, socks, and shirt. “Take off whatever you don’t want to weigh you down.”

“Okay,” Sebastian says. He picks at the hem of his own shirt, and doesn’t take it off.

Derrick raises his eyebrows. “You want me to turn around?”

“No, it’s - I still have the bruise. Where Jaylen hit me.” Sebastian grimaces. “It doesn’t look...good.”

“Mine’s not exactly pretty,” Derrick says, and gestures at his incineration scar, a fractal thing that starts at the seam where his shoulder and neck meet, and curves down over his chest. It was an angry red when he first arrived in the Trench, and it’s faded since then, but still looks pink, jagged, and alien against his pale skin.

“Prettier than mine,” Sebastian says with a snort. 

Still, he peels off his shirt, and Derrick immediately understands what he meant. The bruise on Sebastian’s side isn’t just a bruise - it’s dark even against his dark skin, a void of color that pulses almost like it’s breathing. The edges lap at Sebastian’s ribcage and then recede all at once with a mind of their own. And it’s _smoking_ , sending off waves of black-purple vapor that fade as soon as they hit the air.

“Have you thought about seeing someone for that,” Derrick says, glad that coaching his voice into being even-toned is easier than coaching it into sounding appropriately surprised.

Sebastian gives him a look.

“I’m serious,” Derrick says, with a shrug. “I mean, I think Morrow was the only doctor around here, so maybe you lost your chance.”

“Asshole,” Sebastian says, but he’s grinning when he says it, which is the reaction Derrick was looking for. All three of his eyes light up a brighter shade of blue than usual, and he makes a sound like an omnichord, a remarkably clear cascade of sparkly, electronic tones. Derrick can’t parse what’s happening at first, until he realizes that this is his first time ever hearing Sebastian Telephone laugh.

“What the fuck,” Derrick says aloud, wonderingly, before he can catch himself.

Sebastian stops laughing almost immediately. He gives Derrick a look that borders on wounded, which is less funny than it might have been at literally any other time. 

“What?” he asks.

“That’s how you laugh?” Derrick asks. “For real?”

“Yeah, it is,” Sebastian says, defensive now, folding his arms over his broad chest like he’s shielding himself from Derrick. Like he’s trying to become smaller, less of something to look at.

“I wasn’t making fun of you,” Derrick says, the words slurring on his tongue in his haste to get them out. He can’t explain what he _was_ doing, because he doesn’t really know himself. Something about Sebastian’s laugh just struck him as too whimsical, too unique to be real, and now Sebastian might never laugh around him again. Which, honestly, feels like more of a loss than it might have just a minute ago.

“I like your laugh,” he adds. His face is heating up again, and he has to look away from Sebastian, his gaze boring a hole into the window beside them. “It’s...nice. I wasn’t trying to be a dick, I just - I’ve never heard it before.”

“I’ve never heard _you_ laugh before,” Sebastian says, somewhat pointedly. He doesn’t sound angry, but he doesn’t sound forgiving, either. Petulant, maybe.

“Probably not,” Derrick says.

“Why are we going swimming, anyway?” Sebastian asks. Derrick can see his reflection in the window glass, but can’t bring himself to look at it. It feels too much like looking directly at Sebastian himself. “I guess we can’t drown, since we’re dead, but... _do_ we have to breathe down here?” He pauses, then: “You’re not gonna try to swim all the way to the surface, right? Because I don’t - I don’t know if I could do that.”

Swimming to surface was not an idea Derrick had considered. He doesn’t think it would work, anyway, and Sebastian doesn’t seem to think so either. As far as ways to escape the Trench go, it feels too easy. Too _correct_ , considering the nonsense rules that govern the rest of this place. So, no, they won’t be swimming that far.

“I wanted to talk to the Monitor,” Derrick says, instead. Maybe it sounds less stupid, after the idea of swimming all the way out of the Trench. Maybe it doesn’t. He can’t read Sebastian’s face in the glass clearly enough to tell.

Sebastian makes a strained, chiming noise in his throat, like he’s choking back another laugh. “ _What_?”

“I told you it was stupid,” Derrick says. He turns around, leaning on the glass now. “I said it was stupid, and you said ‘of course’.”

“You could have led with the Monitor part.”

“You don’t have to come.” Derrick shrugs. He could pretend, even, that he would prefer doing this alone, if Sebastian wants to leave. He’s good at doing things alone. He wouldn’t even have the urge to chase after Sebastian or anything, and he _certainly_ wouldn’t have to think about what it meant that he went and found Sebastian to ask him on this terrible errand in the first place.

“No, I said I would come, so I’ll come,” Sebastian says, firmly. “I’m not going to leave you.”

Derrick smiles thinly. “I appreciate it, Telephone.”

“You can call me Seb, you know,” Sebastian says. He steps up to join Derrick at the window, putting a hand up to the glass. “Most people do. I mean, I know you can’t usually talk like most people, but.” He shrugs. “I dunno. If you want.”

It feels like a peace offering. Derrick never called the Garages by nicknames, except for the ones like Teddy who insisted on it, and no one ever called him anything. Most of the Garages called him _Krueger_ until it was easy to believe they had wilfully forgotten his first name.

“Sure, Seb,” he says, rolling the syllable around in his mouth. It’s less musical than _Telephone_. He can’t tell if he likes it.

“Why do you want to talk to the Monitor?” Sebastian - _Seb_ \- asks, fingers softly drumming out a beat on the window. “Only Nora does that.”

“That’s kind of the point,” Derrick says. He’s been thinking about this all day - talked to Moody about it, actually, which gave him the spark of this idea. “Nora’s the only one who talks to the Monitor, and she got to keep her voice. She’s, what, the fifth person who died? And she can still talk like she showed up in Season Ten.”

“She has a stutter,” Seb says, a little reproachfully.

“But she doesn’t talk in Morse. Or open her mouth and have the radio come out. You know what I mean.”

“I don’t think I follow.”

“Nora’s important to the Monitor,” Derrick says, falling back on the simplest way he knows how to explain it. “So she can still talk the way she used to, more or less. Because it knows she exists. Because she’s useful to it.”

Seb frowns, his brow wrinkled. “You think the Monitor doesn’t know we exist.”

“That’s what it has Nora for, right?” Derrick asks. “Doing the new arrival thing. Giving tours. Running everything so it doesn’t have to. I mean, it probably knows we’re in here, but we’re about as good as ants in an ant farm to it.”

“And you want to...what?” Seb asks, and trails off, stalling until he can think of the right words. “Remind it we’re here?”

“I want it to know who we are,” Derrick answers. “So maybe it’ll think we’re important too.”

It feels selfish, saying it out loud. This whole time in the Trench, he’s been fighting for people to see him. To know who he is. And he’s #14 on the idol board now, against all odds, so shouldn’t that be enough? Isn’t that enough recognition to keep him from seeking out something more, to tide him over until one day he’s released and has his voice back for good?

“You miss your voice,” Seb says, softly. He’s still drumming his fingers on the window glass, staring out into the dark water beyond the thin pane.

Derrick arches an eyebrow. “Don’t you?”

“You don’t have to be noticed by the Monitor to be important,” Seb says, and doesn’t answer the question. 

He turns to Derrick, and Derrick is caught by Seb’s eyes instantly, trapped in the spectral blue glow of them like twin - no, triplet - tractor beams pulling him to a place he can’t name. Derrick’s heart throws itself against his ribs like a moth battering itself against a screen door to get to a flame. _I’m pining for the moon_ , the radio in his head supplies without warning, and Derrick swallows, feeling a click in his throat, the fizz of static humming through his jaw.

“You _are_ important,” Seb is saying, Derrick only half-listening until Seb reaches for him and he pulls back, afraid of - something, he doesn’t know what. Seb gives him a look that’s half disappointed and half understanding, but he pulls back, too.

“You don’t deserve to suffer, Derrick,” Seb says. “The Monitor doesn’t have to know who you are for that to be true.”

Derrick feels - he doesn’t know what he feels. Embarrassed, maybe, that Sebastian Telephone is the one telling _him_ he doesn’t deserve to suffer. Stupid, maybe, for pulling away. Annoyed, maybe, for getting so distracted when he really only came here to do one thing, with such little time left to do it.

“Yeah, okay,” he says, and turns his back on Seb for just a moment, to pick up the metal bucket of peanuts next to Nora’s statue. It’s not completely full, and the nuts rattle around inside as Derrick hefts it, brings it back over to the window with him.

“Let’s go swimming,” he tells Seb, and slams the bucket against the glass once, twice, until the window breaks.

***

The Hall floods about as quickly as Derrick assumed it would, but it still takes him by surprise. He takes a deep breath as the water starts to come through the cracks in the window, filling his lungs to capacity, and reaches for Seb so they won’t lose each other in the dark. That’s all he has time to do before they’re both thrown under by a massive torrent of water that shatters the window in front of them and sends them head-over-heels tumbling into the sea outside the Trench.

Derrick blinks his eyes against the harsh sting of saltwater, and finds that he can open them all the way with a little effort. There’s nothing much to see except the glow of Seb’s eyes, more like an anglerfish than the moon now that they’re in the water, dimmed by the oppressive darkness that sits heavy over the Trench. Against every better instinct he has, Derrick grips Seb’s arm a little tighter and opens his mouth to breathe.

The water rushes into his mouth eagerly, and does nothing. Derrick barely even feels it inside of him - it’s like breathing air, but thicker somehow, the salt itching at his throat. A part of him is glad that he was right about not having to breathe anymore, and a part of him feels like it’s a loss, another missing piece that makes the players of the Null Team something less than what they were before.

There’s a strangled, angry noise, and Derrick turns his head to see Seb exclaiming _something_ at him, bubbles expelling from his open mouth. Probably something about how he shouldn’t have tried to breathe the water before they knew it was safe. Derrick smirks and raises his eyebrows and says nothing, trying to hope his body language gets across _But I was right, though._

Seb exclaims again, frustrated, and twists his arm in Derrick’s grip so that they’re both grabbing each other by the forearm, locked together. Derrick digs his fingers into Seb’s skin without meaning to. He won’t pull away this time. He can’t, or one of them might get lost. But every inch of contact between himself and Seb feels like a charge passed through a thinly insulated wire, an exchange of static that makes the spectral frequencies in Derrick’s mind leap to life in fits and starts.

 _And what if there were two,_ the radio supplies, _side by side in orbit?_

Derrick reaches a hand to his temple, like he could smack the song out of his head if he tried hard enough. He knows he can’t. It doesn’t work that way. He massages the ridge of his brow instead, and resists the urge to let go of Seb.

It’s hard to see anything around them, even by the light of Seb’s eyes. Maybe Derrick should have put more time into figuring out how to find the Monitor, once they got out here, but there wasn’t time for that. This whole day, he’s felt like he’s running out of time. He doesn’t even have that much to say to people.

Seb’s arm flexes under Derrick’s fingertips, and he twists himself, gesturing with an outstretched hand to a pinprick of light in the distance. Maybe not enough to go by, but it’s something, at least. Some kind of beacon. Maybe the eyes of the Monitor, or maybe something else, luring them in. Seb kicks off with his legs, and Derrick does too, each of them pulling the other along as they swim.

It’s almost a thrill, going somewhere without knowing the destination. The hallways of the Trench are easy to get lost in, and rearrange themselves into labyrinthine configurations, but the destinations are almost always stagnant. The number of rooms hasn’t changed since Season 10, because no one new has died. Derrick can’t remember the last time he got lost, _really_ lost, or struck out blindly in the dark in search of something he wasn’t certain he would find. It feels novel.

The light in the distance gets larger as Seb and Derrick get closer, splits into two wide, unblemished circles that glow like floodlights. Eyes, maybe. There’s a body attached to them that Derrick can’t quite make sense of, something fleshy and milk-white, pulsing and squirming. Tentacles that expand and contract and coil over themselves, thick as a human body, so long that their edges simply disappear into the shadows. Derrick’s stomach turns over with the sick feeling that he’s seeing something he isn’t meant to.

The twin floodlight-eyes blink, then blink again. Seb’s grip tightens on Derrick’s arm, uneven fingernails making crescents in his skin.

 _huh,_ the Monitor says, and Derrick’s vision goes white.

***

He wakes up drenched, cold tile digging into his shoulder blades. The light of the room feels harsh against his eyes, and Derrick has to shut them for a long moment before he feels ready to sit up and get his bearings. He’s dizzy when he looks around again, but it’s better than before, however slightly.

He’s at the edge of the pool in the Trench - the actual swimming pool, not the sea outside. Derrick can’t remember who found this place first, but it’s become one of the few communal recreation areas they have. His bare feet are close enough to the edge that he could dip them into the water if he stretched just a few inches, but his joints hurt too much to stretch. It feels like he fell here from a great height, or was dropped, like a doll landing limply on the floor.

“Well,” Seb says from above him, “I’d say that went well.”

Derrick laughs wryly. He doesn’t know how much time passed in the water, but if Seb isn’t talking in Morse yet, it’s still solstice. He can trust his own voice, for once.

“Sorry I dragged you out there,” he says.

“Don’t be,” Seb says. “I had fun. I think.” He makes a face, mouth screwed up in uncertainty, and then offers Derrick his hand. “I don’t think we’re getting our voices back any time soon.”

Derrick stares at Seb’s hand for a moment before realizing what it’s for. He takes it, and levers himself up to his feet, his toes curling against the slick, wet tile. The urge possesses him to get in the pool. He’s already soaking wet, so it wouldn’t really matter. He lets the compulsion pass, though, and instead stands there with Seb’s hand held loosely in his, trying to think of what to say.

“It’s fine,” he settles on, finally. “It was a long shot, anyway.”

“I’m sorry,” Seb says.

“Don’t be,” Derrick says, echoing the exchange from only a moment ago. “I had fun, too.”

He should say something else, he knows. Something more meaningful, while he can still say that kind of thing in his own voice. But he can’t make the words come, and he’s not sure if Seb wants to hear them - certainly not from him, anyway.

“Weird night,” he says, instead.

“Weird night,” Seb agrees. He laughs again, that sparkling omnichord laugh that Derrick didn’t think he would get to hear again. It’s still as good as the first time.

Derrick slips his hand out of Seb’s, goes to wipe the saltwater and sweat off on his shirt, and finds himself still shirtless. The clothes he and Seb took off in preparation of swimming are back in the Hall, probably just as soaking wet as they are.

“ _Forgot my shirt at the water’s edge,_ ” he says under his breath, radio static popping on his tongue.

“What?” Seb asks.

“Don’t worry about it,” Derrick says. “We should go get our clothes.”

“Oh,” Seb says. “Okay. Sure.”

He reaches for Derrick’s hand again, and Derrick lets him take it.

**Author's Note:**

> uh oh i did all my notes up top so i don't know what to put down here. title/lyrics are from nightswimming by rem. you can find me on twitter @corpserevivers or in the crabitat discord server, and comments and are as always appreciated!


End file.
